Although produced in widely different cultural contexts, the two texts collected here have several similarities. Both exist in several manuscript versions, so that questions of authorship and notions of a definitive text are very different from colonial and post-independence writing. Both are produced in a world very different from our own, and each reflects a mental and spiritual map of the world which is very different from that of most contemporary Singaporeans.
The Sejarah Melayu (often translated as The Malay Annals) is perhaps the best known of all classical Malay texts. It exists in several manuscript versions, with the first printed text produced by Abdullah in Singapore in 1831. While it describes historical and semi-mythological events commencing with Alexander the Great's (Raja Iskandar's) visit to India, the earliest extant manuscript appears to have been written in the early 1600s. The two extracts collected here both concern Singapore, and have provided fertile material for subsequent writers.
Mandeville's Travels were first printed in 1499, and circulated widely in medieval and Renaissance Europe, again in different manuscript and later printed versions. While the text purports to be authored by an English knight, attempts to locate a historical John Mandeville have been unsuccessful, and all surviving texts are the product of many authors and transcribers. There is considerable controversy over whether Mandeville or another writer made the journey to China described in the Travels, or whether "Mandeville's" longest trip was to his nearest library to read and compile other medieval travellers' accounts. The section excerpted here in all probability describes Sumatra and other areas in Southeast Asia.
Both the Sejarah Melayu and Mandeville's Travels are extremely cosmopolitan, making reference to many different cultural sources. Both texts are also characterized by a different attitude towards time and space from that expressed in contemporary texts. Each takes for granted a religious community as their frame of reference--Christendom for the Travels, Islam for the Sejarah Melayu. In both the individual author and/or narrator of the text seems unimportant, and may in fact be a composite figure: we learn little about the narrator's inner life. Each text also exhibits what Benedict Anderson, following Walter Benjamin, has called "the medieval concept of simultaneity along time," in which every event is linked to scripture and the unfolding of history takes place within the eyes of God (24). There is no progressive history here, or radical disjuncture between past and present. Time is marked by the passing of generations and genealogical lists: there is no sense of "simultaneity-across-time," of many events happening at the same time, which is so marked an element of later texts such as the novel or the Hollywood feature movie.
Last updated: June 28, 2002